A good article on the Fiery Furnaces in today’s Globe and Mail. Should be a good lead-in to Saturday’s concert.

Pitchformula is what I’d do if a) I were still a musician (though some would argue that, being a drummer, I never was a musician) and b) had oodles of time on my hands (read: was not married).

A movie that my wife, my friends and I were talking about last week. My wife and one of our friends claim it “defines our generation”. I say it defines whining. From The Onion A.V. Club.

If some independent body ranked the most embarrassing attempts at early-’90s Generation X-ploitation, the strongest candidates would be OK Soda, that Subaru commercial where the floppy-haired teen babbles about his car being “like punk rock,” and the dreary 1994 romantic comedy Reality Bites. Arriving two years after Cameron Crowe’s more credible Seattle romance Singles, and about six months before the smartly neutral Friends, Reality Bites embodied seemingly every odious post-Nirvana media trend. The title alone was laughably faux-hip, and the movie’s portrait of slackerdom—limply enacted by Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Steve Zahn, and Janeane Garofalo—was both broad and shallow.

In a picture full of painful moments, it’s hard to decide on the lowest point. Budding documentary filmmaker Ryder refusing to let her artless interview footage be juiced up by Ben Stiller’s music-video channel? Smug, dirty-haired rocker Hawke spouting poseur put-downs? Garofalo’s AIDS scare? The post-collegiate pals ironically dancing around a convenience store to “My Sharona”? Or naming their favorite Good Times episodes? Or singing “Conjunction Junction”?

It would be nice, on the occasion of the film’s 10th anniversary and attendant special-edition DVD, to redefine Reality Bites as a goofy, harmless artifact of its time, the grunge-era equivalent of Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis. But the DVD makes that tough, with its overly reverent half-hour “remembrance” featurette and commentary track by director Stiller and screenwriter Helen Childress (who wrote the movie when she was 19, with much tinkering by producers looking to make “a Big Chill for twentysomethings”).

No one acknowledges the obvious—that a heinous idea got even worse when Stiller signed on to direct. The just-canceled Ben Stiller Show was home to lacerating sketches like “The Grungies,” which gave The Monkees a satiric flannel makeover not far removed from Reality Bites’ genuinely phony Gen-X-ness, so it’s probably no coincidence that the movie’s cast squirts an extra shot of venom into lines like “If I could bottle the sexual tension between Bonnie Franklin and Schneider, I could solve the energy crisis.” Everyone seems to have at least an unconscious idea of how lousy and opportunistic the movie is.

Reality Bites holds some fascination today, for its streamlined conception of what the early ’90s were all about, and for marking one of the first appearances of Stiller’s soon-to-be-ubiquitous inarticulate-neurotic character. But no matter how much the filmmakers may wish “the moment has been appropriately captured” (as Hawke says at one point), it’s far more significant that the DVD includes promotional clips for The A-Team, Knight Rider, Magnum P.I., and Quantum Leap. That’s some nostalgia that Reality Bites’ target audience can actually use. —Noel Murray

I wanna get me some of this:

books

• berger, tamara faith . the way of the whore
• jacobs, jane . dark age ahead
• mcadam, colin . some great thing
• sedaris, david . dress your family in corduroy and denim
• toews, miriam . a complicated kindness
• tuchman, barbara . the guns of august

cds

• division of laura lee . das not compute
• gomez . split the difference
• good, matthew . white light rock and roll review
• harvey, pj . uh hu her
• iron and wine . september 2002
• merchant, natalie . the house carpenters daughter
• newman, a.c. . the slow wonder
• sea ray . stars at noon
• nine inch nails . bleed through
• spoon . the beast and dragon are adored

dvds

• stealing beauty
• six feet under: season 2

from KeepMedia: US film board rules “Fahrenheit 9/11” unsuitable for teens, sparks protest

US film board rules “Fahrenheit 9/11” unsuitable for teens, sparks protest
Jun 14 ’04
NEW YORK (AFP) — The United States film ratings board ruled that Michael Moore’s controversial “Fahrenheit 9/11” film cannot be viewed by people under 17 unless they are accompanied by an adult, sparking an immediate appeal from the distributors.

The explosive documentary, set to open in US cinemas on June 25, won the top prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, denounces the White House’s handling of its “war on terror” and the war on Iraq.

The Motion Picture Association of America said it had given the movie an “R” adult rating because it contained “violent and disturbing images” and strong language.

The film’s distributor, Lions Gate Films, responded late Sunday by filing an emergency appeal to have the rating reviewed.

Lions Gate chairman Tom Ortenberg said in a statement the ratings board’s decision was “completely unjustified”.

“We are adamant about overturning this decision in an expeditious manner to ensure that as many people as possible … are able to see one of the most important and thought-provoking films of our time,” he said.

Moore, the director, noted in the statement that it was “very possible” that many teenagers who were now 15 and 16 would be “recruited to serve in Iraq in the next couple of years”.

“If they are old enough to be recruited and capable of being in combat and risking their lives, they certainly deserve the right to see what is going on in Iraq,” he said in the statement.

“Farenheit 9/11” alleges financial connections between the family of President George W. Bush, its associates and prominent Saudi families, including that of Osama bin Laden, who is blamed for the September 11 attacks.

It also explores the Bush administration’s role in evacuating bin Laden relatives from the US after the September 11 attacks.

In May Walt Disney Co., which had held the rights to “Farenheit 9/11”, created a furore by banning its Miramax Films subsidiary from distributing the movie before the November 2 US presidential elections. Disney justified its decision by saying it was “a nonpartisan company”.

Disney then ceded the rights to two of its studio executives, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who have associated with Lions Gate Films and IFC Entertainment to distibute the film.

from the BBC: Online ‘penny jukebox’ launched
By Darren Waters, BBC News Online entertainment staff

Sonic Selector offers access to 36,000 albums
Europe’s leading music download firm, OD2, has launched an online jukebox which costs just one penny per track.

Sonic Selector is a piece of software that lets users listen, but not download, songs from a library of more than 350,000 tracks.

The service, which is available to users of websites MSN, Tiscali and MTV, is a rival to Napster UK, which offers a similar online jukebox.

The launch comes one day before Apple is expected to launch iTunes in the UK.

Sonic Selector is available in the UK, France, Germany and Italy and will only work with users of Windows Media Player, version nine.

‘Instant record collection’

Charles Grimsdale, chief executive of OD2, said streaming music – rather than downloading – was a very popular method of listening on a PC.

“Most of the music our users listen to on their PCs will be streamed,” he said.

“We wanted to create a digital jukebox, and Sonic Selector gives people an instant record collection which is 350,000-tracks strong.”

Download company Napster launched a UK service in May
Napster offers a similar streaming service but only to customers who pay a £9.95 a month subscription. Subscribers are allowed to stream an unlimited number of songs.

Users of OD2’s technology can still download and copy tracks to CDs or portable players for an average of 99p per song.

For the first two weeks of the launch of Sonic Selector, users will be able to download tracks for half the usual price.

Unlike Napster and iTunes, OD2 does not brand its own download music services.

Instead it provides the technology to retailers such as HMV, Virgin, MTV, MSN and Tiscali.

‘Format wars’

Mr Grimsdale said the “format wars” of digital music downloading was a problem that needed to be resolved.

There are currently two key rival music formats for legally-downloaded music – Windows Media Audio (WMA) and AAC, which is produced by Apple.

Music downloaded from websites which are in the WMA format cannot be played on Apple’s popular iPod music player.

And tracks downloaded from Apple’s iTunes music store can only be transferred to one portable digital player – the iPod.

Tracks from both services can be copied to a compact disc, however.

The problem is due to digital rights management (DRM) technology, which is used to stop people copying music and transferring it to different computers.

‘Gateways’

Mr Grimsdale said: “My guess is that there will be gateways between the two DRM systems in the not too distant future.

“We are looking at ways of solving that problem.”

But he said the format wars would not lead to a situation similar to the VHS and Beta tape battles of the 1980s, which left one system dominant and the other all but obsolete.

“Our commitment is that the catalogue you download, you own,” he said.

He added there were currently 70 different portable digital music players that could play music downloaded from OD2’s services.

Some old man, sitting on a halfwall around Church & Wellesley, said something to me today. He said, “You, you’re only number six. I’m number fuckin’ one!!”

Huh. I would’ve put myself higher than that.

• Elephant (imdb | rotten tomatoes | buy) was brilliant. Using real kids made it feel authentic, and made it chilling. You watch all thse kids, all seeming normal, wondering who was going to snap first and who was going to get it in the end. And how bad. Some you felt bad for, others you didn’t…and the fact that I could even think that way made me realize how, with a few well-placed and unfortunate triggers, kids (and people in general) could find themselves on that sliding scale of detachment with a gun in their hand.
• Big Fish (imdb | rotten tomatoes | buy) was Forrest Gump done by Tim Burton. That’s not to say it’s bad, it’s just to say what it was.

a clip from last night’s Daily Show, by way of Everything Isn’t Under Control.

“Writ of douchebaggery” seals it, Stewart’s indisputably the funniest man on TV now that Gervais is gone.

I’m actually having a hard time disagreeing with some of these.

From retroCRUSH